Still alive, Hal thought.
Cressingham had balked at the final charge, but the maddened warhorse had the bit and did it anyway, somewhere in the maddened brain of it remembering all the training. Rearing and flailing, it struck out with huge metalled hooves and the fat Treasurer, a bad horseman at best, lost his seat and fell off into the mud, with a great crash that whirled stars into him.
Something huge and heavy stepped on his thigh – his own horse – and he heard the bone break. A great blow smacked him in the back as he struggled to rise and pitched him face first into the soft ground and he struggled like a pinned beetle, tasting the musky fresh earthworm of it, choking and blind because it had clogged up breathing holes and eyeslit.
He scrabbled frantically at the helmet ties, lost in the dark and airless cave of the bucket helm; finally, he tore it off in a mad, frenzied shriek and whooped in a breath, his vision no more than a blur. He saw the man come at him and lifted his good hand, free of weapons, out in front, sobbing with relief and pain. Ransomed.
Fat Davey saw a man fatter by far than himself these days, a man weeping with fear and holding his hand out, pleading for mercy. He had no idea who he was, only what he was.
Nae quarter the day wee mannie, he snarled to himself and drove the pike deep into the three swans on the man’s swollen belly, put his horny, crusted. bare foot on the astonished terror of the man’s iron-framed face and levered the weapon free again.
‘Remember Berwick,’ he growled and moved on.
***
No quarter today, thought Addaf, seeing the horses crashing and falling. Which made this no place for us. He turned to Heydin Captain and saw the grim set of his face.
‘Away lads,’ he heard Heydin say. ‘Away as you value your lives.’
Addaf looked at the bow and the nocked arrow. He had not shot once, he thought with disgust, drew back to his ear in a sudden, swift movement and released the shaft blindly into the air, heard it screech away from him as the air hissed through a maker’s flaw in the head.
He threw the bow-bag to one side and slung the weapon across his back still strung, wincing at what that would do to the tiller. He headed after the others, throwing away the entangling shoes from around his neck, the iron-rimmed hat, unlacing the gambeson as he went.
Down at the river, with the howling at his naked heels, he threw off the precious, expensive gambeson and wondered if he could dog-paddle well enough with a bow in one hand, for he would not give that up save at the very last.
They were broken and Thweng was not surprised. The French Method, he thought bleakly, which means ruin when inflicted on a wall of points. His own horse fretted and mewed from the pain of the great bloody scar down one shoulder, where a pike had torn through the thick padding, spilling out the wool in pink-stained skeins.
The Angels circled and milled, no more than a dozen of them now, balked by spearpoints, reduced to hurling insults and their lances and maces and even their great slitted helmets; he heard one chanting, as if he knelt in the cool still of a chapel – blessed be the Lord my strength, who teaches my hands to war and my fingers to fight.
Around him, Thweng saw the foot waver, take a step back, away from the wet-mouthed snarls behind the thicket of steadily approaching spearpoints. A blade was thrown down; a shield was dropped.
Then they were off like a flock of chickens before the fox.
‘The bridge,’ Thweng yelled and pointed. The Angels swung their mounts.
The bridge. The only way left to safety and plugged by a ragged square of points, like a caltrop in the neck of a bottle.
The arrow came out of nowhere, spinning and wobbling, the weight of the bodkin point dragging it down like a stooping hawk and shrieking as the wind howled through a small maker’s flaw.
Moray, who was trying to send the Selkirk bowmen to the right, down the river to dissuade the other two English Battles from crossing, had just turned to Berowald, smiling.
‘Et fuga verterunt angli,’ he had called out and Berowald, who knew the last words embroidered on the cloth story consecrated to Norman victory in Bayeux, waved one hand. And the English fled – he was chuckling at it still when he saw Moray look up at the sound of the thin whistling, his domed, crested helm under one arm so that he could call out clearly. He was smiling, because he knew they had won.